writing a chat thingy in NodeJS + clientside JS.. the idea is to make it as simple and foolproof as possible, easy to host, with optional end to end encryption that's entirely taken care of on the client. The server will just forward what it receives, optionally caching it and allowing clients to pull messages based on a timestamp delta. Everything will be 'groups', a DM with a friend is a 2 person group, a groupchat is a 3 person group, etc, to keep things simple. Probably add file/images later
@anthropy are the messages queued/stored on the server? I miss the times where Skype cached them on both clients (also enabling backlogs as a side effect) and then syncing them in a flood only when the user with the stored messages went online.
@draconigen optionally, yes! you can turn on logging by clicking the little gear icon next to a chat and setting it to on, a red dot will appear next to the chat to indicate logging is active. Chats with logging active will forward any message any user that joins has missed since they were last online in that group. Every conversation is a group basically, a DM is just a group with 2 people basically.
It's set up in such a way that the client will be able to do end to end encryption within this.
kinda made some progress with the chat thingy. It's a fully functional multi-user text chat now with a server end and a client end, logging and automatic replay of missed messages to a user when they log in (but only when logging is enabled), and some basic terrible themes. I suppose next would be implementing some features like inline images and what not, although I could also go straight for end to end encryption and implement those media features later on. hmmm
What's a good name for this chat thingy? I'm somewhat biased towards dragony/scaly names but I'll take any suggestion that's catchy and hints at its functionality (easy, secure chat)
hmm maybe some less common word like 'Autarchy', referring to independence and self government? but that seems a bit overkill for just a chat thing 😅 although maybe Autarchat? though then it just kinda seems too esoteric and hard to remember for people lol, why is naming things so difficult :drgn_lurk_sob:
@anthropy This reminds me of one of the first projects I was working on when I learned programming in C#, a socket based chat client/server. The good old days when software was much more simple. :drgn_flat:
@volpeon yee I remember doing similar things, and very cursed things, like basically this project and writing a 'woof' encryption plugin where every character was encoded as X amount of Woofs and then a Bark, where X was the ascii character ID.. so "o" would translate to 111x "Woof" and 1x "Bark". It worked flawlessly and looked extremely confusing and overwhelming in wireshark hahah
This time around I'm using Websockets, so kind of similar but arguably more foolproof, adding encryption later
Add comment